


Gift Wrapped

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: Punisher (Comics)
Genre: Christmas, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:00:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21963205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: It's been a long time since Frank wanted Christmas to be special.
Relationships: Frank Castle/David "Micro" Lieberman
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20





	Gift Wrapped

It's been years since Frank felt any urge to celebrate much of anything, least of all a holiday that had never meant much of anything to him in the first place. 

As a kid, he'd been keenly aware that he was  _ supposed _ to enjoy Christmas. Maybe not midnight or morning mass, but certainly the presents, the food, the excitement. And he'd tried, if only to make his ma happy, but it never stuck for him the way he knew it was meant to. 

He didn't believe in Santa any more than he'd ever believed in boogeymen, and likely would have done the same to Saint Nick as he would any other intruder caught breaking in. Family gatherings were stressful to him, a chance for adults who didn't like each other to publicly rekindle their old feuds, noisy older cousins and whiny younger ones vying for attention, food that was served too early and yet managed to always be cold by the time he got a plate. 

Christmas was a kid's holiday, he figured, and he'd been a lousy kid. Solemn, quick to anger, natural loner. His gran liked to say he was an old soul and his Uncle Carl said he was 'precocious little bastard', both different ways of saying the same thing: he didn't act like a kid, but since he looked like one, adults didn't want him around either.

It was only after having kids of his own that he got any kind of spirit for the holiday. His kids  _ loved _ Christmas shit, the way kids were supposed to, and Frank might never have been a model father or husband, but he'd liked making his family happy. Even if the holiday didn't mean all that much to him, he was happy to do whatever he could to make it good for them. 

With his family gone, Christmas is worse than stressful. Holiday music and decorations don't bother him much, but the fact that so much of the world shuts down for a day does. He doesn't need extra time alone with his thoughts, thanks much. It's worse than a natural disaster -- at least in a natural disaster there's something to do, people to help. December 25th means nothing to help, nothing to do but wait for people to drag themselves back into the swing of normal life on the 26th. It's twenty-four hours of tension, even on the odd year when he finds a real job to work.

Where do you take a kid who's been kidnapped when the state's shut down and her family is dead, the hospital too busy to be trusted with an uninjured, distraught child? What do you do with human trafficking victims when there's eighteen inches of snow on the ground and none of them have more than the barest scraps of clothing? 

It's shit. The whole goddamn set-up of it sucks. Frank grew up Catholic, he's not got any problem with anyone celebrating their holiday, but shutting the whole fucking system down for holiday that not everyone celebrates has always struck him as stupid, and now is just frustrating. 

Once, when he was younger and dumber, he’d wanted to find something special in the time of year. He’d wanted to see the magic, wanted to experience the simple joy people talked about. Somewhere along the line, he’d accepted that it wasn’t for him and there was no changing it, that he simply wasn’t wired for it.

He didn't expect having Lieberman in his life would change any of that. Lieberman doesn't seem to go in much for holidays; he liked the decorations, and Frank can tolerate tinsel and a stupid fucking tree in one corner of their shared space, but Lieberman seemed to pick up quick on Frank's lack of interest in the holiday, because he sets the tree up himself a week or so before Christmas and he takes it down the day after. He never wraps any gifts for Frank or tries to make him partake in any stupid festive shit. 

Three years Frank's watched Lieberman set up a tree, hang some lights or some shiny tinsel, and stand back and look at the display with a smile. They've moved their base of operations every year, and the tree has been different every year -- the first one was a genuine went-to-farm-and-chopped-it-down spruce, and it made Frank sneeze to sit too near. Both years after that it was artificial, one an ugly glitter white, followed by a nicer, almost real looking fake pine.

Frank's about as big on tradition as he is on celebration, but seeing Linus set up his stupid tree has become that. It marks the time of year, shows another cycle has passed, and Frank's surprised, a little, to find that he takes the sight of Lieberman setting his fourth tree up as a comfort. 

It's another fake one, fluffy and plastic-y green, dark enough to almost look real until you got close, if the light's low enough not to give away the telling sheen to the faux-needles. Lieberman strings lights and hangs bulbs and then stands back from it smiling and nodding to himself, and Frank finds himself feeling weirdly... pleased. 

Lieberman likes Christmas. It's not his holiday, but he likes the spirit of it, the generosity, people giving just for the sake of giving. Pretty naive take when he's helped Frank deal with so many ugly things, but maybe that's part of what charms Frank. Linus has seen plenty of the world's ugly and he still finds joy in this useless little shit, still looks and hopes for the best in the rest of the world. 

Frank likes Linus happy. He'll do just about anything for that, and if it took him four years to realize that, well, he was never worried about being top of his academic class. He may not be bright, or in touch with his emotions (outside of anger, at least), but he's passably perceptive when he bothers to try.

There’s never gifts under these trees, because Lieberman doesn’t try to drag Frank into his holiday shit, and he’s certainly not wrapping the things he buys himself. Frank thinks the trees and the garlands and all that is more about bringing the festivity of the season into their dark, dull space than anything else; decoration with no practical purpose. 

A day after the tree goes up, Frank leaves Lieberman a note about taking a couple days for a surveillance job, so Lieberman won’t question him being gone for a while. There’s not much Frank can do about the way Lieberman tends to worry when he’s out conducting his war, so he elects not to think about that and just goes about his business. 

It’s been a while since he bought something for another person that wasn’t a way of killing them. Or food, he supposes; he’s bought Linus dinner a few times, fed a couple of folks he’s worked with or rescued. It takes him longer than he likes to figure out how he wants to do this, what the best options are. He’s never been good at grand gestures, not like this, but he knows he wants it. 

Linus reads a lot. Mysteries, historical fiction, weird books about tech development that might as well be written in Greek, full of charts and graphs and words like ‘cron’ and ‘microkernel’, completely impenetrable to Frank. He likes these disgustingly bitter herbal teas, tool sets with more pieces than he could possibly have actual use for, magnets with stupid puns on them.

He takes his time, shopping around. It’s not something he’s particularly comfortable doing, making him feel weirdly inadequate when he struggles to pick between one thing and another, unsure which Lieberman would prefer. Lieberman seems to know damn near everything about Frank, from the cut and size of clothing he wears to the foods he prefers. Frank can’t even remember if Linus prefers white or red.

Everything is bought in cash, stockpiled in a bolthole he knows Linus won’t go poking around in without reason. Wrapping gifts is harder than he remembers, but then, he’d left most of that to Maria when it had been a regular thing to deal with. He’s not just out of practice, he was never really practiced to begin with.

The effort is what matters, he tells himself. Maybe it is. At the very least, he figures, looking at the crumbled mess he’s made trying to wrap a mug, Lieberman isn’t likely to complain about a bunch of free stuff.

Between them, it’s not unusual for Frank to slip out of bed in the middle of the night, not unusual for him to leave without saying anything and turn up hours or days later in various conditions. Linus seems to like sharing a bed, likes Frank’s unconscious tendency to wrap his arms around his bulk and hold him, but he also seems to have adapted quickly to Frank’s nonexistent schedule. He barely wakes up anymore when Frank gets out of bed, if Frank’s careful about how he moves.

Snow is falling thick and at four in the morning on Christmas day, even New York City seems, for just a moment, peaceful. Frank piles his gifts into a bag and hopeful that his luck will hold out and Linus will still be asleep when he makes it back an hour later, weirdly embarrassed by the idea of being caught sneaking around with gifts instead of just giving them to Lieberman when he’d bought them. 

His luck does hold; Lieberman sleeps on when he slips back into the building. He sleeps while Frank arranges his gifts -- which look more shoddy than ever under the tree -- and while Frank fiddles with the lights, frowning as he tries to figure out the timer Linus has everything hooked into. 

Finally, the tree is lit, the presents looking as nice as they’re going to underneath it. A little crowd of eight poorly wrapped packages, illuminated by the cheerful, multicoloured lights strung on the tree. He quietly pulls his boots back off, stows his coat and handgun, and sneaks back into their bedroom, shucking out of his jeans as he goes and sliding back under the blankets for another hour or so. 

Sleep catches him unawares. He’d expected to lay awake until Linus got up; he wakes instead in the cold morning light struggling through the high, grimy windows of the factory building they’re using to Linus curled over him, kissing him. It feels so simple, so natural, to roll into the embrace, slow and lazy.

It’s not an unusual arrangement for the odd days when they can wake up next to each other anymore. Maybe that’s why it feels so good to let it happen, let Lieberman push him back against the pillows and bite at his jawline, kiss at his neck, until he feels about ready to squirm out of his skin.

“You wanna just stay here,” Linus asks, and he’s so warm this close, the soft weight of him pressing Frank into the thin mattress. “Supposed to snow all day. Gonna be cold out there.”

Tempting. Were it not for the tree, the gifts under it, Frank probably could be persuaded. Hell, even with it, there’s plenty of him that wants to indulge in this. It’s actually a bit of work to make himself grunt out a negative and mutter, “We gotta eat. ‘N I want coffee. G’up, c’mon.”

Linus makes a show of sighing and flopping dramatically over to find his glasses. His shiver once he gets out of the bed is less burlesque, and he’s just as quick as Frank to find something warmer to put on. He can hear, keeping pace just behind, the moment when Lieberman notices the tree is lit despite the hour, a little perplexed noise he often makes while he’s tinkering with something. It’s surprisingly hard to keep a straight face when Linus stops a few steps into the room and then turns to look at Frank, somewhere between curious and apprehensive.

“I didn’t get you anything,” he says, flat tone threaded through with a thin sort of hurt that Frank doesn’t like.

He shakes his head and shrugs. “Pretty sure that ain’t th’ point.”

He wants to say that Linus himself has been more of a gift than Frank’s deserved, year round and regardless of season. He wants to say that having his cheer and regular positivity and his steadfast company is a gift Frank couldn’t ever match. That he’d never expected to get back to a place, mentally or emotionally, where he  _ wanted _ to make someone’s Christmas morning a special surprise like this.

He can’t say any of that, not with Lieberman looking at him that way, so he waves him off toward the tree. “You’re supposed to open ‘em. Go on, I’ll get coffee going.”

Linus turns back toward the tree, the soft look on his face aimed at the pile of ugly gifts, and that makes things a little easier. As Frank heads toward the counter with the hotplate to get water boiling, Linus says, “I’m sure I can find something for you to unwrap later.”

“Gonna be awful cold under the tree for what I want to unwrap,” Frank says, words coming easy despite the way warmth blooms on his cheeks. Linus’s laughter sounds like a gift all it’s own, 

“You’ll just have to keep me warm then,” he says, and picks up the first of his gifts, turning it over in his hands as he looks for a place to start tearing the paper. “That’s a job I know you can manage.”

And that's something special, Frank thinks, something worth holding on to, the faith and trust that he can take care of someone else. That Linus wants him to.


End file.
